‘Divide et Impera’? Office Accumulation in State-wide Parties and the Process of Decentralization in Spain

Abstract

Most recent studies about internal power distribution within state-wide parties in previous unitary countries, like Spain, show that they have changed less than was initially expected. But how national party leaders are able to counteract the decentralizing pressures that the first studies in this field underlined must still be explained. In this article we reformulate a mechanism for national political leaders to keep their parliamentary parties under control that Van Biezen has suggested for new European democracies. We argue that keeping party and public offices apart at the regional level is a vital part of a chain of command whereby national party leaders are able to control their party's regional governments. Using a quantitative analysis of national and regional elites for the first time we show that office overlapping is thus substantially less intense at the regional level than at the national level in the two main Spanish state-wide parties, and that this feature is related to regional politicians' degree of autonomy. Still, this ‘divide et impera’ strategy is employed less over time.